ABSTRACT
The development of punishment in practice and in theory has missed numerous opportunities to include the perspectives of women. This chapter considers this writing out of women and later turns to the early attempts by feminists to put right the wrong and to challenge masculinist accounts of the place which punishment has held in societies, contemporary and past. The privatisation of the punishment of women has been institutionalised both through the enactment of laws which have sanctioned this relationship and through the censures placed on the behaviour of women and girls through more informal, often family-based, moral injunctions. Retributive principles have considered punishment as a moral imperative requiring that a wrongful act be repaid by a punishment which 'fits' the crime and that the punishment should, by mirroring the crime, be seen to make recompense to the one who has been wronged. Utilitarian principles of punishment rested on belief in a legal system which was impartial and applied equitably.
